Rights Quotes

The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.-Calvin Coolidge

 

 

 

Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as our prince of peace, of civil rights. We owe him something major that will keep his memory alive.-Morgan Freeman

 

 

 

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one's rights and double one's duties.-Arthur Schopenhauer

 

 

 

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.-Frederick Douglass

 

 

 

All the rights secured to the citizens under the Constitution are worth nothing, and a mere bubble, except guaranteed to them by an independent and virtuous Judiciary.-Andrew Jackson

 

 

 

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.-Andrew Jackson

 

 

 

I weep for the liberty of my country when I see at this early day of its successful experiment that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office.-Andrew Jackson

 

 

 

The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer... form the great body of the people of the United States, they are the bone and sinew of the country men who love liberty and desire nothing but equal rights and equal laws.-Andrew Jackson

 

 

 

What rights are those that dare not resist for them?-Alfred Lord Tennyson

 

 

 

He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.-Jackie Kennedy

 

 

 

We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities.-Bill Maher

 

 

 

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.-Lyndon B. Johnson

 

 

 

The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.-Alexander Hamilton

 

 

 

Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood.-Jimmy Carter

 

 

 

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.-Samuel Adams

 

 

 

Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.-Toni Morrison

 

 

 

I am not interested in picking up crumbs of compassion thrown from the table of someone who considers himself my master. I want the full menu of rights.-Desmond Tutu

 

 

 

Let me go over this again on the reclaiming the civil rights movement. People of faith that believe that you have an equal right to justice - that is the essence. And if it's not the essence, then we've been sold a pack of lies. The essence is everyone deserves a shot - the content of character, not the color of skin.-Glenn Beck

 

 

 

What we don't have a right to is healthcare, housing, or handouts. We don't have those rights.-Glenn Beck

 

 

 

One cannot imagine St. Francis of Assisi talking about rights.-Simone Weil

 

 

 

Christianity is the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of men.-Novalis

 

 

 

The earth is the mother of all people, and all people should have equal rights upon it.-Chief Joseph

 

 

 

Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.-Maximilien Robespierre

 

 

 

The Constitution guarantees us our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. It doesn't guarantee our rights to charity.-Jesse Ventura

 

 

 

I believe the equal rights amendment is a necessity of life for all citizens. The cabinet sometimes felt that I shouldn't be so outspoken.-Betty Ford

 

 

 

The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not its mineral rights.-J. Paul Getty

 

 

 

I demanded more rights for women because I know what women had to put up with.-Evita Peron

 

 

 

The nation's government has just handed me the bill that grants us our civil rights. I am receiving it before you, certain that I am accepting this on behalf of all Argentinean women, and I can feel my hands tremble with joy as they grasp the laurel proclaiming victory.-Evita Peron

 

 

 

In the wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, not does it comport with our policy so to do. It is only when our rights are invaded or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparation for our defence.-James Monroe

 

 

 

Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

 

 

 

Everything happens for a reason. I'm used to it, I prepare for it. Like I say, at the end of the day, those in charge of their own destiny are going to do what's rights for them and their family.-Shaquille O'Neal

 

 

 

There must be a world revolution which puts an end to all materialistic conditions hindering woman from performing her natural role in life and driving her to carry out man's duties in order to be equal in rights.-Muammar al-Gaddafi

 

 

 

We always hear about the rights of democracy, but the major responsibility of it is participation.-Wynton Marsalis

 

 

 

While the men of the steel industry were going through blood and gas in defense of their rights and their homes and their families, elsewhere on the far-flung C.I.O. front the hosts of labor were advancing and intelligent and permanent progress was being made.-John L. Lewis

 

 

 

The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.-John L. Lewis

 

 

 

Human rights commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society... It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff.-Stephen Harper

 

 

 

The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights.-William Blackstone

 

 

 

So the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is out there preserving and fighting for, and sometimes winning and sometimes losing, the fight for First Amendment rights in comics and, more generally, for freedom of speech.-Neil Gaiman

 

 

 

Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.-Imelda Marcos

 

 

 

When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law?-Benjamin Harrison

 

The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.-Colin Powell

 

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.-Virginia Woolf

 

You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.-Virginia Woolf

 

It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.-Kurt Vonnegut

 

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.-James A. Baldwin

 

You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.-Brian Tracy

 

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?-Blaise Pascal

 

I had the right to remain silent... but I didn't have the ability.-Ron White

 

Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.-Arthur Schopenhauer

 

National character is only another name for the particular form which the littleness, perversity and baseness of mankind take in every country. Every nation mocks at other nations, and all are right.-Arthur Schopenhauer

 

For the first time ever I was taking the family on the road. We stayed with my in-laws, which on life's list of experiences ranks right below sitting in a tub full of scissors.-Jeff Foxworthy

 

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.-Alan Watts

 

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?-Charles M. Schulz

 

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.-Alice Walker

 

I won't accept anything less than the best a player's capable of doing... and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!-Oliver Wendell Holmes

 

Aunt Marion was right... Never marry a musician, and never answer the door.-Charles M. Schulz

 

Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.-Andrew Jackson

 

The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough.-Andrew Jackson

 

Nullification means insurrection and war; and the other states have a right to put it down.-Andrew Jackson

 

Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish? Nothing else.-Epictetus

 

I'm in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.-Milton Friedman

 

The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.-Jackie Robinson

 

Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.-Victor Hugo

 

It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.-Victor Hugo

 

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.-Victor Hugo

 

More than anything else, I want the folks back at home to think right of me.-Elvis Presley

 

I'll never feel comfortable taking a strong drink, and I'll never feel easy smoking a cigarette. I just don't think those things are right for me.-Elvis Presley

 

I was an only child, and Mother was always right with me all my life. I used to get very angry at her when I was growing up-it's a natural thing.-Elvis Presley

 

If you pick the right people and give them the opportunity to spread their wings and put compensation as a carrier behind it you almost don't have to manage them.-Jack Welch

 

If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong, it represents a loss of a billion dollars, perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right, it is the future of this company for the next century.-Jack Welch

 

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.-Samuel Johnson

 

I didn't leave bodybuilding until I felt that I had gone as far as I could go. It will be the same with my film career. When I feel the time is right, I will then consider public service. I feel that the highest honor comes from serving people and your country.-Arnold Schwarzenegger

 

Freedom is a right ultimately defended by the sacrifice of America's servicemen and women.-Arnold Schwarzenegger

 

Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.-Aldous Huxley

 

The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.-Aldous Huxley

 

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.-Lou Holtz

 

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.-Rainer Maria Rilke

 

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.-Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.-William Butler Yeats

 

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.-George Orwell

 

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.-George Orwell

 

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?-George Orwell

 

I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.-Martin Luther

 

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.-Dwight D. Eisenhower

 

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from over mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.-Angelina Jolie

 

They're right to think that about me, because I'm the person most likely to sleep with my female fans, I genuinely love other women. And I think they know that.-Angelina Jolie

 

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.-P. J. O'Rourke

 

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.-Carl Jung

 

The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.-Carl Jung

 

Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.-Anne Frank

 

How true Daddy's words were when he said: all children must look after their own upbringing. Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.-Anne Frank

 

I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.-Charlie Chaplin

 

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.-H. L. Mencken

 

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.-H. L. Mencken

 

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.-George Bernard Shaw

 

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.-George Bernard Shaw

 

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.-George Bernard Shaw

 

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.-George Bernard Shaw

 

Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.-John Locke

 
Last modified 05-Sep-2011 7:36 AM